COICA: Lets the government decide what you can read on the internet

I've previously written about how the United States government confiscated 82 websites last month. That story seems to only be an early taste of what is to come.

The “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (COICA) that has been introduced to the American Congress would make website confiscation much easier than it has been so far. Sure, they confiscate without COICA too, with legal basis in federal civil forfeiture law, but with COICA, it becomes much easier to do it. COICA will simply give the government the power to censor the Domain Name System (DNS). This system is what "runs" the internet, but it is also the system that lets governments (and internet providers) prevent users from seeing certain websites. The government will therefore be able to create lists of websites that are to be blocked, simply by deciding that these websites should be blocked.

David Ulevitch, the founder and CEO of OpenDNS, argued in a recent blog entry that this is a terrible idea.

"[A]s we’ve seen with the ongoing Wikileaks.org saga, the government will try and utilize whatever resources it can to take sites offline. There is absolutely no need to arm them with a tool to automate it, let alone one that sits outside of any judicial review as COICA does."

It's difficult to not support Ulevitch's conclusion. Seeing how the Obama administration has acted with the WikiLeaks affair, it is difficult to understand just why they should now become even more powerful. People may think that the administration will only do "good" with this new power vested in it, but the historical evidence fails to support it. The new power can create processes that makes it very difficult to get off the list and it could lead towards the "wrong" websites ending up on the list.

I am very afraid that the last may become the case. The problem here is not so much the websites that clearly target an illegal market may end up being blocked. That the government has an ability to ensure that illegal material is taken off the internet, is not necessarily a major problem, at least as long as there is a trial to determine whether it is actually the case.

The real problem is that legitimate - or semi-legitimate - websites may be pulled down along with the illegitimate ones. Seeing just how the US has treated WikiLeaks now, I suspect that other legal - but disliked - websites will also be flushed with this new act.

I will be following this case to see where it goes.

Hacking group Anonymeous attack Paypal

PayPal recently cut off WikiLeaks from its service and thereby closed an important source of funding for Julian Assange's company. The company claimed that this was done because WikiLeaks violated its acceptable use policy, “which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”

This argument would, however, appear to include various other media organizations too, since newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post and other media groups routinely publish material that is classified. The argument is therefore likely just a made up claim to get rid of WikiLeaks.

The hacking group Anonymous has declared on 4chan and elsewhere that they regard PayPal's decision as an attempt to censor the whistle-blowing site. Anonymeous said on its website:

"While we don’t have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas.

We can not let this happen. This is why our intention is to find out who is responsible for this failed attempt at censorship. This is why we intend to utilize our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy."

WikiLeaks blocked in France?

France has a long history of not being very positive to different freedoms and in the WikiLeaks case, they've once more established themselves as among the worse. The French attacked the site early and declared that they did not want to see the site hosted in France. They got their wish and now they may have accordingly also blocked the website wikileaks.ch.

The United States has previously also closed down the wikileaks.org website because it was hacked. That reason is of course quite novel and interesting. More likely than not, the US government is involved. This suspicion is strengthened by the fact that they now also block wikileaks.ch. I wrote about this in a post yesterday.

Some people may think it's just fine that governments protect themselves by closing down websites, but once they begin closing down one website, there is a great chance that they are not done.

Is WikiLeaks.ch blocked in the US?

WikiLeaks.ch appears to have been blocked in the US. This could of course be caused by some temporary error, but if it is not, it is a pretty big attack on freedoms of expression and freedoms of the press. The first amendment dictates that press organizations have the right to publish and WikiLeaks should by all likelihood be considered a media organization. The US government therefore violates the constitution if it is in some form involved in the blocking of Wikileaks.ch. This is serious business.

This follows from the prior closing of the domain WikiLeaks.org, which seems to have also been ordered by the American government. This information is of course speculative at best and may be wrong, but the reality is that the website loads in Europe, but not in the US.

Update: WikiLeaks.ch seems to be working in the US again.

Google will begin censoring torrent searches

It isn't unexpected at all, but Google has now decided that it will begin censoring searches so that people will no longer be able to use Google to find torrent sites and places that might be distributing pirated content. Under the new standard, takedown requests will be responded to within 24 hours and after that, searches will no longer show the sites that have been "taken down" from the results page.

This is problematic, of course, because Google is used by many people across the world. It seems to be a forgotten issue, but torrent websites can be used to download legal material and while torrent sites would never become particularly popular if they hosted only legal material, they do represent a platform for people who wish to distribute such content too.

It is problematic, moreover, that search engines seem to be held accountable to some degree, for search results they simply find. This seems to have become established since the website torrent-finder.com was among the seized website this week, even if it did not in any way host any illegal content, or even actual torrent files, on its platform.

More on the Google story here.

Avoiding US Censorship, Torrent Sites May Flee To China

After the American government seized 82 domain names this week, there has been discussions on what this means for torrent sites hosted in the United States. TorrentFreak, a website that deals with torrent related issues, has offered one suggestion on their website recently:

"China is often criticized for its Internet censorship practices. Although this is certainly valid with regard to political issues, the United States is rapidly becoming one of the most progressive countries when it comes to commercial censorship. Safeguarding commercial interests is increasingly preferred above the rights of the general public. Ironically, BitTorrent sites may have to flee to China to keep their ‘freedom’." The full story can be read here.

It is, of course, ironic that a country where freedoms do not tend to be the priority, may very well be the best place to continue such practices. This situation is, however, entirely a creation of the west, with increasing tendencies to control the content on the Internet.

Torrent websites do tend to focus on illegal material and although this material is not hosted directly on the websites that are targeted, the websites make the distribution possible. This has been found to be illegal in several cases. Although the confiscation of domains that host illegal material is not entirely unwarranted, it does, however, constitute one step towards blocking other content. Past examples show that when one step is first taken, the next step goes easier. With recent discussions among politicians in the United States to simply confiscate the Wikileaks website, this trend may be on the way. Time will only show more such examples.

Amazon says it dumped WikiLeaks because it put innocent people in jeopardy

I previously wrote about how Wikileaks was kicked off its servers yesterday by Amazon, its hosting company. Although it looked like this was an act of censorship, since the company was pressured by politicians, they now argue that it happened for a completely different reason. That the two happened at the same time is, if we are to believe Amazon, merely a coincidence.

In a story in New York Times today, a press release by the company is cited, where Amazon states that they "had canceled [their] relationship with WikiLeaks not because of “a government inquiry,” but because it decided that the organization was violating the terms of service for the program." The full story can be read here.

Although Amazon may tell the truth, the explanation sounds a little bit like an attempt to hide the company's true motives for removing Wikileaks from its servers. Web hosts are often a little more tolerable to paying customers than what Amazon appears to have been. The more likely explanation is therefore, perhaps, that the company simply felt that any association between Amazon and Wikileaks could prove to be negative in the long run. By getting rid of Wikileaks now, they may minimize their potential losses.

Calls are made to boycott Amazon by free speech activists.

This case raises some questions regarding Amazon's behavior, but perhaps more questions about the activities of politicians. Politicians are powerful people and it should be questioned whether they should be allowed to put pressure on companies that host websites that have not yet been found to be illegal. A trial should normally be a precondition for action, but that does not seem to stop senator Joe Lieberman, who was heavily involved in pressuring Amazon.